The aims of an organization of this sort [Dialectics
Workshop] are primarily to bring out the relevance of Marx to the present time,
to the science of today. I am talking here not on my view of what Marx means
for today but on what I think he meant for his time. The relevance of this for
science and philosophy today is for you to develop . . .

Marx and Science

The principal contribution of Marx was to emphasize
the social character of science. Although he acknowledged the cognitive successes
of the sciences, he nevertheless comprehended them as social phenomena, part
of the general social and economic processes of their times (that would be his
hypothesis): and if at times they were isolated from social forces, then they
were to be understood as a product of social conflicts and pressures which allowed
for such isolation. Even the pure scientists, responding solely to inner motivations
(perhaps curiosity) would be in a social situation which produced that kind
of curiosity, that kind of isolation.

To be social meant further. to respond to socially
produced motivations and purposes, and to do so with socially stimulated modes
of inquiry and of explanation, and with criteria of success or failure which
themselves changed from century to century . . . The sciences were not in any
full sense promoted by pleasurable motivations for, in the development of the
sciences, Marx saw a central, perhaps the essential, contribution to
the grim and practical task of mastering nature. * * *

On the deliberately conscious linkup of science
with industry, and the social implication, Marx says (Capital, v. 1):
“The implements of labour, in the form of machinery, necessitate the substitution
of natural forces for human force, and the conscious application of science,
instead of rule of thumb" (p 382) . . . and "Intelligence in production
expands in one direction because it vanishes in many others. What is lost by
the detail labourers, is concentrated in the capital that employs them . . .
modern industry makes science a productive force and presses it into the service
of capital" (p 355). * * *

You may remember this passage from The Communist
Manifesto: "The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation
hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician,
the lawyer, the priest, the poet. and the scientist into wage labourers."

On the distinction between science and cooperative
labour, there is an interesting passage from vol. 3 of Capital: "Universal
labour is scientific labour, such as discoveries and inventions. This labour
is conditioned on the cooperation of living fellow beings and on the labours
of those who have gone before. Cooperative labour; on the other hand, is a direct
co‑operation of living individuals. * * *

Marx early recognized that, like prejudices and
religious beliefs, so also ideas have social function and determinants, not
least of them scientific ideas, even those of the most confirmed and objectively
established sort. He was an admirer of Charles Darwin whose work he saw as a
penetrating insight and proof indeed of the historical character of biological
nature. But he also noted with amusement that Darwin's hypothesis saw nature
through a social image. He wrote to LaSalle, at a time when he was still friendly
with LaSalle, “Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a natural scientific
basis for the class struggle in history. One has to put up with the crude English
method of development, of course. Despite all deficiencies, not only is the
death blow dealt here for the first time to 'teleology' in the natural sciences
but its rational meaning is empirically explained (Selected Correspondence,
p. 151). Note that you don't throw out teleology, you explain it.

Then, in a letter to Engels, he says: “It is remarkable how
Darwin recognizes. among the beasts and the plants, his English society with
its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, 'inventions’,
and the Malthusian 'struggle for existence.' It is Hobbes' war of all against
all, and one is reminded of Hegel's Phenomenology where civil society
is described as a 'spiritual animal kingdom,' while in Darwin the animal kingdom
figures as civil society" (Ibid. pp 156‑7).

Marx also saw Darwin's work as suggestive for human
history, and for the instrumental role of the human body and of technology and
science. Here is another of those simply marvelous footnotes in Capital:
"Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature's Technology, i. e.,
in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as
instruments of production for sustaining life in the plants and animals. Does
not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material
basis of a social organization, deserve equal attention? And would not such
a history be easier to compile since, as Vico says, human history differs from
natural history in this, that we have made the former but not the latter."

Marx consistently treated science under the general
heading of labor and he understood scientific conceptions to be joined with
the material basis of human existence, with practical life, and with social
relations among men and women. The previous footnote continues: "Technology
discloses man's mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production
by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation
of his social relations and of the mental conceptions that flow from them."
An extraordinary claim! If one really understood the history of technology and
the science that goes with it, that would be the basis for understanding the
mode of formation of social relations and the mental conceptions, the ideologies
of the times! That's in Capital, so it's the fully mature Marx. "The
weak points," he goes on, "in the abstract materialism of natural
science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, these weak points
are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen,
whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own specialty." I think
that's no longer true. Today the liberal as well as the radical spokesmen go
well beyond . . . but this was something quite appropriate for his time.

Marx and Nature

He saw very well, as I'm sure you know, that capital
"first creates bourgeois society and [with it] the universal appropriation
of nature", the key point of bourgeois society, universal in the sense
defined before, that nature takes an instrumental role in human history, nature
becomes an instrument for humanity. That's from the Grundrisse, the huge
preparatory notes for Capital. "For the first time," he continues,
"nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility,
ceases to be recognized for itself. The theoretical discovery of any autonomous
law of nature appears merely as a ruse, a trick, so as to subjugate nature to
human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production."

Now such an attitude towards technology and science,
I think, obviously leads to what Marx considers to be the correct notion of
freedom. the now familiar theme of Marx, in which we reverse the domination
of human beings, either by the "blind" forces of nature or by the
blind forces of society, and turn them upside down.

It is technology that is fundamental because technology
is the mediation between man and nature. He says (Capital, vol. 3): "the
realization of freedom consists in socialized man, tile associated producers,
rationally regulating their material interchange with nature and bringing it
[nature] under their common control instead of allowing it to rule them as a
blind force." Now that must lead beyond craft technology to science with
the impressive modification of human life which is made possible by the cognitive
achievements of science when and if, in Marxist terms, nature is appropriated.
Marx says (in The Grundrisse), "it is neither the direct human labour
he himself performs nor the time which he works, but rather the appropriation
of his own [scientific] productive power, his understanding ofnature and his
mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body, it is, in a word,
the development of the social individual [as scientist] which appears as the
great foundationstone of production and of wealth."

Now to understand what he meant by the phrase "the
social individual" is to understand what he meant by the whole of the Marxist
theory of society and I can't pursue that here . . .

Marx and Method

Unfortunately even today 100 years later, research
into what Marx meant by the scientific method, the methods of thought and investigation,
as shown in his works and as expounded by him, has brought no general agreement
anywhere in the world. There are, however. several explicit texts by Marx on
the scientific method [see Bibliographic Notes, this issue] . . . and then there
are other things to be understood, if you're clever enough, from everything
else that Marx wrote.

Engels often praised Marx's method, even above Marx's
achievements. In a letter of 1895 to Sombart, a soon‑to‑be reactionary
German economist, Engels wrote: "Marx's whole manner of conceiving things
is not a doctrine, but a method. It offers no dogmas, but rather points of reference
for further research. and the method of that research . . ." * * *

Discussing the dialectical method in Capital
(Vol. I Afterword) Marx said: "Of course. the method of presentation must
differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material
[the empirical data] in detail, to analyze its different forms of development,
to trace out their inner connection. Only after this work is done, can the actual
movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life
of the subject matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear
as if we had before us a mere a priori construction. So Marx distinguishes
the method of inquiry from the method of exposition.

By the way, exposition is not just the method of
teaching or pedagogy, it is the actual second stage of scientific work. Inquiry
is factually realistic, beginning with initially uninterpreted data that are
subjected to analysis in stages of complexity which demand insightful abstraction,
simplification and, of course, some subtlety. The factual data are the concrete
entities or the wholes, not the individual partial things, the whole factual
data. And the results of analysis are abstract principles analyzed into theoretically
formulated "parts", i. e., selected out, hypothetically guided by
theories that have been based upon and more or less tested in previous investigations.
So inquiry is a complicated stage of empirical research, and of inductive as
well as hypothetical analysis.

Then comes presentation which gives the results
their necessary developmentor some notion of development anywaywhich
aims to be a conceptual return from abstraction back to the concrete reality,
and brings the component parts or qualities of any subject matter together in
what we would call their organic relatedness and interrelatedness and into their
evolutionary or historical movements. This return will be mediated by expository
as well as theoretical demands so as to clarify the separate qualities and the
various relations among them, including their relations with their environment.

So, for Marx, the truth will be the whole in its
changes. And these changes in turn will be related by historical processes.
This is the Marxian dialectic of contending and negating "forces"
within history . . . negative meaning changing, denying or destroying what was
. . .

DISCUSSANT:Irving Adler (North Bennington, Vermont)

Fifty years ago many people rejected as absurd the
idea that Marx and Engels had created a science of society. They argued that
there couldn't be any such thing as a science of society or a science of history
because (a) controlled experiments are not possible and (b) the student of society
is part of the phenomenon he is studying: hence, objectivity in the study of
society was presumed to be impossible. This argument was the basis of a supposed
absolute distinction between the study of nature. which could be scientific,
and the study of social institutions, which could not.

This distinction has been eroded by what is happening
in the natural sciences themselves. First, all the sciences are now historical
sciences. In the nineteenth century, geology and biology had already become
historical sciences, studying processes and evolution. Since then, physics applied
to astronomy, has become an historical science, studying the origins and evolution
of stars and. galaxies and the forms of matter they contain. Chemistry, too,
has become an historical science, studying prebiotic chemical evolution and
the origin of life. Secondly, it isn't only in the social sciences that the
spectator is part of the act; the spectator is now part of the spectacle in
physics as well. Relativity theory teaches us that measures of length and duration
depend on the speed of the observer, and quantum theory tells us that the more accurately we determine the position of an electron, the less accurately
we can determine its momentum and vice versa, because every act of observation
is an act of interference with the thing observed.

The erosion of this presumed distinction between
the study of nature and the study of society has two important implications.
The first is that the scientific study of society is no less possible than the
scientific study of nature. The second is that dialectical materialism, developed
initially in the social sciences for the study of complex dynamical processes
undergoing evolution, is also the appropriate method for the study of processes
and evolution in the natural sciences. * * *

In what way is dialectical materialism of use to
the scientist? To answer this question, it is important to note first the characterization
of dialectical materialism by Engels that has been called to our attention by
Professor Cohen. Engels said in 1895 in a letter to Sombart, "Marx's whole
manner of conceiving things is not a doctrine, but a method. It offers no finished
dogmas, but rather points of reference for further research and the method of
that research.” . . . Awareness of the principles of dialectical materialism
is a kind of insurance against dogmatism. Each of the principles is a generalization
from past experience in the sciences. But it never takes the form of telling
us what we must find in a particular area of study. It tells us only what we
may find. Then, this reminder of what is possible, becomes the point of reference,
as Engels says, for some research. . . .

Each of the principles of dialectical materialism
is a danger signal, a red flag, if you will, warning of the existence of some
common booby traps for unwary investigators. Among them are: 1) the metaphysical
fallacy, trying to characterize an object by some abstract, absolute essence
rather than by studying its internal and external relationships, its history
and its dynamics: 2) the supernatural or external cause fallacy, failure to
recognize that some motion can be understood as self motion resulting from internal
conflict, 3) the mechanistic fallacy, failure to recognize that qualitative
differences do exist; 4) the reductionist fallacy, ignoring the fact that in
a complex structure or process the whole is greater than the sum of its parts;
5) the eclectic fallacy, failing to recognize that qualitatively distinct factors
may be related; 6) the extrapolation fallacy, extrapolating a law beyond the
time and context for which it has been established, thus unjustifiably converting
what is particular and temporary into what is allegedly general and eternal.

Recent experience in biology provides a good example
of the usefulness of dialectical materialism as insurance against dogmatism.
After Pasteur's experiments settled a 200‑year dispute about spontaneous
generation, his principle that life comes only from life and Virchow's
principle that cells come only from cells were elevated into a dogma assumed
to be valid for all times and circumstances.

Adherence to this dogma was an obstacle that stood
in the way of initiating any meaningful study of the origin of life.
The scientific study of the origin of life began when Oparin, Bernal and Haldane,
consciously using one of the principles of dialectical materialism, challenged
this dogma, pointing out that a law that applies for the period after the origin
of life need not be valid for the period before the origin of life.

Now another dogma has arisen, to take the place of this old
one. This is the dogma asserted as late as 1971 by Jacques Monod that the transfer
of information between nucleic acids and protein can only go in one direction,
from DNA to RNA to protein. The dogma has already been shaken by the
demonstration that in some cases information goes from RNA to DNA but the faith
of the dogmatists has not been shaken. Adherents of dialectical materialism
would keep an open mind on this question. The fact that the transfer of information
goes only in the direction from nucleic acid to protein in living cells does
not preclude the possibility that it may have gone the other way at some
stage in prebiotic chemical evolution.

If the principal function of dialectical materialism
is to serve as an antidote for dogmatism, any formulation of its principles
as a set of rules that nature must obey is a misrepresentation of these
principles. In this category is the assertion on purely philosophical grounds
that "space and time are boundless and infinite" made in the book
"The Fundamentals of Marxist‑Leninist Philosophy" published
in the U.S.S.R. in 1974. In relativistic cosmology, the answer to the question
"is space finite or infinite?" will be obtained only by measuring
the relevant parameters, and not by making some arbitrary presupposition.

I would add only one more point at this time. Dialectical
materialism, like any other theoretical construct, cannot be assumed to be perfect
for all time. It should be reexamined constantly, to be corrected and refined
in the light of experience. It is now over 100 years since its principles were
first formulated in the work of Marx and Engels. More precise formulations of
its principles that are based on the great advances of the sciences in the last
100 years should now be possible.

DISCUSSANTGarland E. Allen (Biology Dept., Washington University)

[Dialectical materialism] is, of course, more than
a method, but as a method it has an enormous amount of applicability in everything
we do and I would like to urge that when we think about learning this method,
we think about its application, toowhat it can be used forthat
we not think about it only in terms of its application to the natural sciences
although that may be the main concern we here more or less directly share. I
think it is obvious that a bench natural scientist who is asking questions and
trying to come to answers can profit from using the method we call dialectical
materialism. In my own work in the history of science, that method has raised
questions of a different sort than I would otherwise have raised . . .

I think the only way to develop the method is to
apply it and see its inner connection in a number of different realms. That
means extra‑academically as well as academically. I think it can help
us, for example, understand and criticize phenomena such as the rise of sociobiology
theory . . . in fact, if one applies the dialectical method to the content of
that so‑called theory, one sees that there are many questions it has left
unanswered and many methods which it has not even looked at . . .

I'm not sure that I agree with Bob Cohen that Marx's
statement is applicable more to his day than oursnamely, the statement
that the idealistic nature of much of science is evident when scientists step
out of their own specialty and begin to make comments on other things. I certainly
see an enormous amount of that today among my colleagues. I see it in sociobiology
where the basic method is to invent genetic components which then are elaborated
into enormous explanations of why they might exist. As Marx and Engels both
pointed out, science deals not with what might be conceived to exist but with
trying to understand what in fact does exist.

I think also that developing our dialectical method
involves putting these things into practice, both in criticizing things like
sociobiological theory and in terms of our own activism in contemporary social
fields. By that I mean that we learn more about the method. to apply even in
our intellectual endeavor, by being on the streets, by means of protest, by
standing up . . . talking about sociobiology . . . doing what we have to do
in our contemporary lives. That's another field of the interaction between theory
and practice in dialectical materialism which I think is absolutely essential
. . .

I don't mean to sound mechanical about it but I
think there's no such thing as theoretical Marxism . . . I tell "theoretical
Marxists" [sociologists] that I think it's a contradiction in terms. Perhaps
the analogy with theoretical physics works on people's minds but I don't think
there is such a tiling as theoretical physics really. Ultimately, things must
be tested in some way. The division of labor between those who theorize and
those who test is a mistake in any realm of human activity, especially in dialectical
materialism. It is a method that has to be practiced in every realm because
it is basically one which sees interconnections, whether in day‑to‑day
political experience, classroom teaching, lab bench science, or the study of
the history of nature.

I want to close with this notion: the theory of
dialectical materialism is powerful and rich because it is first and foremost
a method which grows, is not static or unchanging, but a method which teaches
certain kinds of questions to ask and certain ways of trying to answer them.

AUDIENCE INTERACTION

David Schwartzman (Howard University). Some
writers have maintained there is a contradiction between Engels' formulation
of dialectical materialism and Marx's thinking on the subject. Dr. Cohen, what
are your views on this?

Cohen. I think there are differences but
not contradictions and not conflicts . . . Engels treated questions that Marx
did not treat and which Marx would not have treated. Engels was more concerned,
on behalf of both of' them, with his studies of contemporary natural science.

It's most unfortunate that Engels' notes [in Dialectics
of Nature] were taken as though they were his considered results. He was
writing about historical processes in nature. It's not at all clear that specifically
dialectical relationships were found by him in nature. Historical transitions
were found but, if one keeps to the word dialectic as referring more or less
to self‑changing, inner-generated transitions, one can't find that
in nature. If you define dialectic in the form that it takes place in human
history, you don't find it . . .

Engels raises this question a bit in Anti‑Duhring,
then time and again in Dialectics of Nature. He gives examples, pedagogical
or provocative but, at any rate, unanalyzed examples . . . and says that this
is a future research problem . . . These are not considered or fully worked
out things.

I think Lenin picked it up very well in that very
brief, also incomplete, business where he says that what we need is a bunch
of scientists who understand Hegel and will still be scientists. Then maybe
someday we'll have a material equation of dialectic . . . Lenin wrote that without
knowing of Engels' work [on the dialectics of nature] but it fits very well.
I think it's a very incomplete, open research problem as to what would be an
adequate meaning for an autonomous nature having a dialectic.

I think that, for Marx hirnself, it was of no interest.
He really thought of nature in its relation with mankind and, since nature is
transformed by mankind. there was quite obviously to him a dialectic of that
nature. Whether there was a dialectic in nature itself, independently, he didn't
get to that. I think he would have if he hadn't died so early, because he shared
with his friend Engels this very Eddingtonian type of interest in how nature
gives rise to its own contradictions.

In that sense, one can say with some neoMarxists
that, on one side Engels is more scientific because he talks more about autonomous
nature, and Marx is more man‑centered in dealing with nature. You can
push this contrast but I don't believe in it myself. I think Engels was more
Marxist than that . . .

Stephen Jay Gould (Harvard University). I've
always read Dialectics of Nature as just a series of notes, undigested
examples. I've never understood whether he just put them down as reminders
to work out later . . . The problem of quantity into quality is where Marxist
theory intersects my own work on the nature of rapid change in geology . . .
if someone found my notes for [an unpublished] article, it would be a silly
series of lists.

Cohen. Besides, there were no xeroxes then,
and people had to write down all kinds of quotations.

Gould. On the other hand, if you look at
some of the more finished products, such as The Part Played by Labour in
the Transition from Ape to Man, there Engels is willing to make particular
historical deductions from Marxist theory. There's one thing that's not appreciated
about that essay: Engels didn't just make up right from theory the notion that
the hand represents labor and labor is the ground for society, therefore the
hand must have evolved before the brain. He writes as though he had deduced
it from that principle but, in fact, he cribbed it from Haeckel who had been
arguing that upright posture came first. Nonetheless, in that essay Engels
was willing to make a historical hypothesis and justify it on the basis of
philosophy.

Lester Talkington (Science and Nature). It
seems to me that as soon as historical processes enter the picture, dialectics
come in too, whether in nature independent of man or in purely social processes.
Probably the biggest source of difficulty arises from the lack of clarity on
this in Dialectics of Nature.

Cohen. I think there's a lack of clarity
in understanding Marx on this. If he were Hegelian, it would appear that the
word dialectical would mean something with the word history. If it means tile
same thing as the word historical, we'd just have a synonym. But it it means
something additional to historical . . . In Hegelian usage, at least, it would
seem to be talking, about internally generated changes, changes which come from
internal forces and internal relations. Internal to what? Well, whatever the
entity is that you're looking at, society or whatever.

And there could be dispute over whether dialectical
changes, dialectically formulated history of change in the stars and galaxies,
are of that sort. Or would all the forces of change be external to the entities
involved? Well, that's an astronomical or cosmological problem, not one that
Marx or Engels was competent to deal with or were interested in enough to deal
with it. Engels speculates that there could be some such thing but he didn't
pursue it. He was already in the last years of his life and editing Marx's manuscripts
instead. He had consciously made that choice.

Hegel had done very little on this . . . His only
serious work [in this area], on chemistry, was published only two years ago.
So the Hegelian notion of natural processes is an open research problem for
which no doubt Marx and Lenin and others would have been glad to give research
grants. They didn't have a finished doctrine at all.

Talkington. For example, take plate tectonics
and the motions generated within the earth that give rise to change, to historical
processes, having nothing to do with man or man's understanding. Would you consider
those possibly dialectical processes of nature?

Cohen. I don't know what the word dialectical
would add to just calling them processes. Perhaps it depends on how it is formulated.

Talkington. Wouldn't it possibly give a scientist
some understanding to know dialectics in investigating such a phenomenon?

Cohen. I agree entirely with Gar Allen on
the helpfulness [of dialectical materialism] in pinning down tile questions
to raise. In that sense, yes.

Ullica Segerstrale (Harvard University). Does
the word dialectic have any meaning aside from the question of how a human being
looks at something'?

Garland Allen. Is it meaningful to ask whether
there is a really objective dialectical process independent of people's interpretation
of it? There’s almost no way to answer that question.

Cohen. But there's a very strong hint in
Marx and in Hegel on this: that there’s an obiective dialectic, not a subjective
epistemological way of dealing with it but an objective dialectic in human
history. The invisible hand is just a useful way of referring to the
fact that objective processes exist independently . . . There's an objective
dialectic, yes.

Schwartzman. I think there has been work
since Engels on the question of dialectics in nature . . . But it is, indeed.
a project which is not. developed so much as, say, historical materialism. .
. . Marx anticipated a lot of systems ideas. Some of the metatheories in systems
theory, aspects of cybernetics and so forth could really be the raw materials
for a materialistic dialectics, for developing dialectical materialism as the
most generalized theory of sciencenot simply being reduced to metaphors and
to the old three laws, which really need a lot of work. It's no longer adequate
to use these laws and say that this contributes to a methodological approach,
warning us about certain things. We need to develop it as a formal science .
. . I don't think it's correct to reduce dialectics simply to something evolving
through internal processes. We've come beyond that in terms of looking at things
as systems and their environments. But certainly a star is an entity in itself
and undergoes certain internal processes. So does any other object that natural
scientists study.

Cohen. Well, the entire part‑whole
process can be looked at through the use of systems theory . . . In the general
methodology of science in the last 25 years, certainly in the Soviet Union and
among Marxists elsewhere, it's exactly as you're saying.

ROBERT S. COHENMARX ON HIS SCIENTIFIC METHOD

The following references seem to be the only explicit
statements by Karl Marx on his own methodology.

Marx, Karl 1844 The Holy Family: Section
2.

Marx was still fairly young.

________ 1857 The Grundrisse: Section 3 of General Introduction.

A fairly long, passage on the method of political economy.

________ 1858 A Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy: The Preface.

This unpublished critique of an obscurantist textbook on political economy
includes what is probably the last writing by Marx on method.

Boston University

On the Alienation
of Science

In sixth‑century Ionia man faced Nature in
the confident hope that by his unaided powers he would be able to wrest from
her her secrets; and in his bold enterprise he came to feel himself engaged
upon an ethical as well as a scientific task. Conscience acquired a new scope
as man realized that his progress in knowledge meant submitting his mind to
the acceptance of external fact, of external law; and that the understanding
of this law gave him power to help or harm his fellows. Philanthropia,
love of his fellows, became his inspiration as much as theoria, disinterested
curiosity.

But the obstacles to the growth of this new knowledge and
to the exercise of this new power proved greater, and other, than had been anticipated.
Not only did Nature prove more complex than man had supposed, but political
obstacles also intervened. If democracy dimly and fitfully perceived that its
fate was linked with science, oligarchy had no manner of doubt that ignorance
was its shield . . .

Aristotle saved his scientific soul by a breach
with Platonism where Platonism had lost touch with Nature, but he retained from
Platonism the view that truth is the preserve of the elite, and that social
order must be based on acknowledged superstition.